On "Clashing"

I realized that the work I do on my world and my rules is a form of research - it uses exactly the same mental muscles as my graduate Musicology program. Hence, after a long day of reading academic articles and looking up sources for seminar papers, those muscles I want to use for my game are exactly the ones most fatigued. So, my work has come in fits and bursts.

I'm at a conference right now, so I don't have the time to flesh this out fully, but I wanted to share the bones for a better combat system, based upon a comment on an earlier post of mine. From a combat perspective, the "roll to attack" thing has always bugged me. The roll represents a series of attacks between two individuals, and usually we get one roll per direction of the attacks (Jane->Mercedes and Mercedes ->Jane or Jane->Mercedes and Mercedes->Balpreet and Balpreet->Mercedes). But the conflation of roll to directionality encourages players of thinking of each attack action as a single strike - this is encouraged when we give more martially-skilled players multiple attack rolls in a single turn. While I understand from a mechanical standpoint why this works the way it does, it has always kind of irked me.

This morning, as I sat in the speaker ready room working on the paper I'm presenting tomorrow, a much more elegant solution came to me. I jotted some notes down and will run some tests later (in my copious free time...) to see how they actually play out. As a reminder, I have a custom skill system that I use to adjudicate character-skill-based interactions (like combat)

"Clashing"

Characters can move to engage or disengage w/ other combatants

If folks are engaged, player rolls

Success, target takes damage

Failure, player takes damage

Ties go to side w/ more combatants

Or side that engaged first, if combatant numbers equal

1 roll per clash

If multiple players, use best combatant skill

And player w/ best skill chooses who takes the damage if their team loses

If not wielding melee weapon, can't deal damage

On success, just avoid taking any

Ranged weapons - don't engage, just target somebody and fire (like D&D combat)

Once engaged, can't disengage without roll

Can run away, but gives attacker major bonus

Weapons each have engage range (usually 1 hex)

When engage ranges intersect, characters clash

Still have team-based initiative

Movement

Can move where you want, up to movement speed (jogging, running, cartwheeling, whatever also fine)

When engagement ranges overlap, can choose to clash or not

If yes, movement stops

If not, can keep moving

Clashes w/ more than 2 combatants

If n v 1, defending combatant takes penalty based upon max angle between combatants

Minor for pi/3-2pi/3

Major for pi

If tree, treat every person engaged with more than 1 combatant as a separate clash

Wildcrafting

I am chagrined to say that I did not have wildcrafting/foraging rules in my game until earlier today. Maxwell's question prompted me to look, realize my problem, and begin fixing it.

The first problem is definitional. As I outlined in my previous posts, there are two different ways to use this skill. The first, and more common one, is to harvest food from the wilderness, as part of travelling through a location. The second use entails reliably harvesting food from an area over time. Most forage rules only offer a way of dealing with the first, but I'd like to expand the use of this skill.

I am inspired in this approach by Alexis' Hex Generator 2.0 which, drawing from his Civ IV posts, lists different food sources in wilderness hexes. Each source contributes 1 or more food which then sustains predator populations. It's an elegant top-down system (literally, as large hexes are divided into smaller and smaller ones until we reach an approximately 3mi hex), but I wanted something a little more bottom up.

Anyone can pull a bunch of grass from the ground and eat them. Wildcrafters, first and foremost, know what plants are safe to eat (and what parts of those plants are safe to eat), as well as how to find them. Different environments present different levels of risk.

Being simplistic, I have three categories of risk, high, moderate, and low, which reference both the prevalence of innocuously poisonous plants as well as the threat of local predators. The Sahargeen jungle, a rain forest, is high risk for both of those reasons. The scrubland beyond the jungle's edge is far less risky as there are fewer predators and few toxic plants. Low-risk areas require Apprentice Wildcrafting, moderate-risk ones need Journeyman Wildcrafting, and high-risk regions call for Specialist Wildcrafting. Attempting to forage beyond your level of competency requires a check, and failure indicates that either the forager gets a random encounter while alone in the wilderness or the harvested food is potentially poisonous.

Food availability depends upon the environment, its vegetation and topology. Each foraged region provides a number of "nodes", renewable sources of food - a game track, a berry patch, a gloomy mushroom grove, an excellent fishing spot, etc. The number of nodes varies, as one might expect.

Dense: 3-7 nodes

Moderate: 2-5 nodes

Sparse: 1-3 nodes

Dead: 0-1 nodes

I use a modified 2d6 roll with the highest possible outcome on the two most extreme results on each end (2,3,11,12), and then reducing the number of nodes found by 1 moving towards the center until reaching the minimum value. This gives a consistent 1/6 chance of getting the maximal result, but strongly varies how much one might find in the middle.

We say that 1 node provides enough food for 1 person and we're done.

Sort of. If all we care about is that first usage of wildcrafting, then we are done. But I want to make this skill more useful, so we need to complicate the model by introducing the idea of overharvesting.

Staying in one location and continuing to forage depletes local resources and teaches animals to avoid the area. It's not a sustainable practice. A common guideline I've discovered in the interwebs is to harvest 25% of what is present. If we take that literally, then in feeding 3-7 people, we are drawing from 12-28 nodes.

OK, so there is a lot more food present than is being harvested. What does the original number signify, then? It is the amount of food that can be harvested in a day's work, drawing equitably from a subset of the nodes available. The wildcrafter needs to choose how much food they wish to harvest, knowing how much food is available before the area is depleted and needs a year to recharge.

Thus, if the party will be staying in an area for a while, they can't just set up camp and stay there - foraging will eventually remove all of the available food. Travel time to other areas to harvest reduces the time available to actually forage, commensurately reducing the amount of food acquired, as well.

Obviously, I'll need to run this at the table to see how it works, but I feel like this is a workable solution. I think Master and Grandmaster Wildcrafters would be able to do more with what they found, essentially increasing the number of nodes available.

Trades and Disciplines

Maxwell, from 21st Century D&D commented on my last post about quickly creating NPCs, asking about my breakdown of potential character abilities.

I previously wrote on my frustrations with how classes worked in level-based systems.  My solution was to throw out my previously-held ideas about class and create a new game construct, something I call a trade.

A trade is a grouping of disciplines with which the character gains some skill, along with a particular benefit.  They require a certain number of years to complete and also give the character membership in one of the factions in my world.  They come in two groups:

The core trades, which roughly map to Ranger, Mage, Fighter, and Thief,

Title	Membership or Faith	Benefit	Funds	Time	Disciplines
Hinterlander	Any or none	Have a wilderness hideaway.  Gain 1 ranged weapon and 10 ammunition.	1d3+1 bronze	8	Athlete, Beast-Speaker, Combatant (any), Footpad, Gymnast, Hunter, Tinker, Wrangler
Researcher	Adept’s College or University of Reyjadin	Gain 1 notch in 2 more disciplines.  Gain shard if Mage chosen.	1d3+1 bronze	9	Arcanist or Mage (any), Ascetic, Combatant (Magician), Herbalist, Mechanist, Orator, and Scholar
Soldier	Any Military Group; Pirates of Korg	Gain 1 weapon set (total price less than 2 silver).	1d3+1 bronze	6	Athlete, Beast-Speaker, Combatant (3 different types), and choice between Sailor and Wrangler
Thief	Any Fringe Group; Tarluskani Military	Know a safe place to lay low and a fence in 1d4+1 cities.	3d6+1 bronze	4	Footpad, Gymnast, and two of: Grokist, Mechanist, Mountebank, Pickpocket, and Tinker

and the culture-specific trades, which feature at least one option for every faith tradition in my world.

Title	Membership or Faith	Benefit	Funds	Time	Disciplines
Arbiter	Twin Gods of Left and Right	Can usually detect lies.	1d6+2 bronze	4	Ascetic, Athlete, Grokist, and Thaumaturge
Artist	Brass Orchids, Nithya tribe, Minstrel's Guild.	Gain tools necessary for art form.	1d3+1 bronze	3	Artist, Ascetic, Orator
Conduit	Splendour of Sahargeen	Can talk to trees.	1d6+2 bronze	6	Ascetic, Athlete, Beast-Speaker, Herbalist, Hunter, and Thaumaturge
Druid	Adjraysh	Can contact a specific Sidh.	1d6+2 bronze	5	Ascetic, Beast-Speaker, Herbalist, Orator, and Sorcerer
Monk	The Order	Gain cloak of Tobias and monk's staff.	1d6+2 bronze	5	Ascetic, Grokist, Herbalist, Orator, and Thaumaturge
Muhaddi	Myths of Fiája	Can attract attention with a mystic chant	1d6+2 bronze	3	Ascetic, Orator, and Thaumaturge
Ognemuo	Ancestor Spirits	Can touch spirits.	1d4+1 bronze	4	Ascetic, Combatant (Ognemuo), Grokist, and Herbalist
Priest	Devotees of the One True God	Gain an extra Gift.	1d6+2 bronze	4	Ascetic, Athlete, Orator, and Thaumaturge
Sohei	The Order	Gain an eiku and cloak of Tobias	1d3+1 bronze	4	Ascetic, Athlete, Combatant (Sohei), and Grokist
Thanatphanaios	Ancestor Spirits	Can touch spirits.	1d6+2 bronze	4	Ascetic, Scholar, Orator, and Thaumaturge,

The list of disciplines are as follows:

Aptitude	Disciplines Governed
Strength	Athlete, Combatant, Sailor
Dexterity	Artist, Combatant, Footpad, Gymnast, Pickpocket
Cognition	Arcanist, Artist, Herbalist, Mage, Mechanic, Scholar
Communication	Artist, Beast-Speaker, Mountebank, Orator, Sorcerer
Mindfulness	Ascetic, Grokist, Hunter, Thaumaturge, Tinker, Wrangler

While most of the discipline names are self-evident, a couple hold specific meaning in my world.

Athlete reflects a character's physical endurance and bodily health.  Skilled athletes can fight for longer in combat, take more damage before suffering injuries (the only way to improve health in my game), run and hold their breath longer, and better resist poison and disease.

Combatant is the fighting discipline.  I have a list of 15 or so fighting styles based the different cultures, and each fighting style grants proficiency with several sets of weapons (because learning how to fight with two swords is very different from learning how to fight with one) and a couple of extra abilities based upon the specialties of the fighting style (the Arein Constabulary style can knock people out more easily, for example).  It is also used for defensive purposes as well.

Artist represents a character's skill with a particular artistic medium, incorporating the Bardic Art posts I worked on earlier this summer.

Arcanist is used for ritual magic, a type of magic that uses small fragments of solid magic to power magical ceremonies with specific requirements and limitations.

Mage is used for shard magic, power gained by embedding a large piece of solid magic within the body and harnessing its particular energies.

Beast-Speaker is used to understand and communicate with wild animals.  At high levels the degree of understanding increases such that the character is able to take the form of an animal.

Sorcerer allows the character to use sorcery, the magic of the Sidh which specializes in affecting the mind (illusions, charms, that sort of thing).

Grokist allows the character to understand sapient, sentient creatures.

Thaumaturge allows the character to channel miracles, specific blessings granted by their particular faith (each faith has a different set of 3-5 miracles).

Wrangler governs the taming, training, and riding of mountable animals as well as teaching others how to ride.

A New Skill System

Prodigy, like GURPS and Runequest, is a fully skill-based system, using the same skill mechanic for almost every mechanical test undertaken by the players.

There are four skill systems that I've seen used - d20, 3d6, %, and dice pools.  The d20 system works by rolling 1d20, adding modifiers, and then checking the modified result against a target number determined by the task itself.  What's nice about this system is that the difficulty of the task is directly incorporated into the check, as is the character's skill.  However, the d20 roll is hugely variable, and the chance of critical failure and success are the same no matter one's level of skill.

The 3d6 system (and OD&D's ability score checks work the same way) require rolling your dice (3d6 or d20) under a number determined by the character's proficiency with the skill: so a GURPS character with an 11 Merchant skill would need to roll an 11 or less with 3d6 to succeed a given check.    The bell curve provided by the 3d6 means that results are generated much more reliably.  However, the mechanic does not provide a transparent way of incorporating the difficulty of the task into the check itself - you can add modifiers to the character's skill, but it is a very ad-hoc way to do this.

The percentile system combines some of both of the previous two approaches: characters' skills are ranked 1 to 100.  To test a skill, percentile dice are rolled, and the check succeeds if the dice roll under the character's skill level.  There are some cool number games that can be done here, like special effects on doubles rolled under or over a character's skill level and so on, but it combines the wide variability of the d20 with the fixed difficulty of the 3d6, and so has the aspect from each previous system I most dislike.

The dice pool system gives the player a number of dice equal to their level in the skill, and assigns a strict possibility of success (say 8, 9, or 10 on a d10 or 6 on a d6), with more beneficial results occurring when more successes are rolled.  Thus, a player rolling three d10s might think they have a fairly good chance of getting at least one success.  The odds of success, though, are deceptive (rolling three d10s with success on an 8, 9, or 10 conveys only a 65% chance of any successes, with 4 dice bringing the chance only to 75%), and the system has the highest degree of variability of all the systems, since dice that don't succeed are either merely useless or actively bad (if they roll a failure).

Now, I feel that as one becomes more accomplished with a skill, not only can they accomplish more difficult tasks, but they can also accomplish all tasks more consistently.  I also want my system to be able to concretely incorporate the difficulty of whatever task a player attempts - I want challenging tasks to be challenging and easy tasks to be easy, and I want both of those things to happen with a minimum of ad-hoc adjustments.  I also want it to be fairly uncomplicated - no involved table lookups or complicated math.

The way I've accomplished this is by combining many of the approaches together.  As I've said before, I rank a character's level of skill in one of 6 tiers: Novice, Apprentice, Journeyman, Specialist, Master, and Grandmaster.

Skill tier	Dice Rolled	Difficulty Value
Novice	1d6	6
Apprentice	1d6+1d4	9
Journeyman	1d6+2d4	12
Specialist	2d6+2d4	15
Master	2d6+3d4	18
Grandmaster	3d6+3d4	22

This approach borrows from the dice pool system in that as more skill is obtained more dice are rolled.  However, unlike the dice pool system, all dice matter - they are summed together and checked against the task's difficulty value.  Because more dice produce a stronger bell curve effect, the expected value of each die roll is 3 less than the difficulty value of a task of equal tier (because of adding in aptitudes, which are scaled from 1 to 6), which means that increasing skill not only increases the overall total, but it also increases consistency when performing tasks.  Lastly, by assigning difficulty values for targets, the task attempted by the character now absolutely factors into the test.

Moreover, when circumstances change, I can alter the difficulty of the test in one of two ways: I can add or subtract 1 to the DV for minor things or I can change the tier of challenge for larger difficulties.  My options for changing the circumstances of the die roll are restricted because of this tiered system.

While I've yet to run a real game with these rules, I've run several oneshots and combat scenarios, and the mechanic has worked exactly as I like it to, but I'd welcome any thoughts folks have on it.